Batman Strikes Again in 2008

After the wildly successful and much darker portrayal of Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego in the 2005 prequel Batman Begins, the sequel is set to start filming in April of this year.

The next film, called The Dark Knight, will be helmed by director Christopher Nolan who also directed Batman Begins. The Dark Knight will be the first live-action Batman film without the word "Batman" in its title.

Christian Bale will reprise his role as the lead character and Heath Ledger will star opposite Bale as the Joker.  Batman Begins ended with the Dark Knight on his way to investigate a new criminal that had surfaced (The Joker).

This Joker, however, will not be the flamboyant trickster made famous by Jack Nicholson in the 1989 film Batman. As Ledger revealed in an earlier interview with the Toronto Star, the new Joker will be "more nuanced and dark and more along the lines of a Clockwork Orange kind of feel. [It’s] less about his laugh and more about his eyes".

BACK TO THE ORIGINS 

Batman Begins rebooted the Batman franchise after an eight-year hiatus and commercial failure of the 1997 film Batman & Robin.

Returning to the DC comic book’s darker roots and a younger Bruce Wayne, the film centers on the origins of Batman’s turmoil, how he came to be "Batman" and how he masters both the mental and physical disciplines to fight evil (or execute revenge). It features stellar martial arts scenes including sequences where Bruce Wayne must engage in ninja training in the Himalayas while being recruited by a vigilante group called the League of Shadows.  

Director Nolan has said that in developing Batman's combat method and the film's instinctual fight sequences, he searched for a style that married the gritty intensity of street fighting with a disciplined martial arts approach.

"For Batman, everything is about function, about the most effective way of doing something; so we needed a style that is brutal, economical and real." 

Since Batman’s fighting style is integral to his character, we hope to see more of it in the next film. The filmmakers investigated and used an offshoot art of Jeet Kune Do, called the Keysi Fighting Method, for the original film.

The Dark Knight will shoot for 13 weeks in Chicago, with additional shooting expected in London, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Hong Kong. It has an expected release date of July 18, 2008.